


Out of Frequency

by Azzandra



Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Girl Genius Event Week, Space AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-15
Updated: 2018-10-15
Packaged: 2019-08-02 16:01:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,880
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16308290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azzandra/pseuds/Azzandra
Summary: It's Girl Genius, but... IN SPACE!





	1. A Song Calls Them Home

**Author's Note:**

> For Girl Genius Event Week, I did a series of interconnected one-shots for a Space AU, which was unexpectedly fun! I only did six days, though. Never found a good idea for any kind of cake. But it was fun participating anyway! So here's the Space AU one-shots, in one convenient package for your consumption.

_Waitin' every day_

_Till my mind go mad,_

_Will you ever come back?_

_Stick around till the sky turn black_

_And I hear you say_

_I'm on my way_

_Got me under your thumb_

_What a big fun_

_Come around, be my moon and the sun_

_Till the day that we're done_

_"[Out of Frequency](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Jcxswsoy4)" - The Asteroids Galaxy Tour_

* * *

“…The Heterodynes, you see, they drank a bit of starlight back in the day,” the old man intoned, a smirk at the corner of his mouth as the audience hung on his every word. “Rest of us, we came from the earth an’ reached out our hands to catch the light, but the Heterodynes were the other way around. Rarefied bein’s fallen down among us. Monsters, ‘cause what else survives in space? Is how the Jägers got made, too. Why’s no one figured out how to make alien troops 'cept the Heterodynes? Because you make a Jäger by givin’ him a bit of Heterodyne blood, an’  making him just a bit human. Just a bit, an’ eventually, the human’s goin’ to run out, an’ the alien’s goin’ to come back with a vengeance.”

The old man took a swig of his drink, and bartender pushed him another without asking. He was slurring his words already, but it added something of a provincial spacer charm to his voice.

“That’s why ol’ Wulfenbach should worry,” the old man continued. “'Cause the Heterodynes ain’t coming back. An’ if they ain’t, then eventually, the Jägers’ll run out of human, an’ just be all monsters again. An’ then we’ll see how his shiny armada does against 'em.”

“That can’t be true,” someone argued, the stool squeaking as a young blonde woman turned to look at the old man.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” the old man mocked, “forget myself sometimes. Shoulda remembered to ask someone who really knows this stuff.” He punctuated this remark with a flick against the young woman’s name badge, which declared: Agatha Clay - Technician 1st Tier.

The bar burst into a wave of laughter, all the earlier tension broken. Agatha herself turned red, lips pressed together tightly.

“Why d'you think the Heterodynes never strayed away from their Dyin’ Star?” the old man continued, trying to recapture the attention of the audience, voice rising over the sound of shuffling as people started peeling away from the crowd, or returning to their conversations. His eyes rolled frantically, trying to identify the next person who might supply him with a drink. “The Heterodynes need the starlight as much the Jägers need the blood.”

“First of all, it’s not called the Dying Star, it’s called the Dyne Star,” Agatha said, now turning argumentative. “And how do you even drink starlight? It’s not a liquid.”

“Well, see, uh,” the man blustered, “seein’ as how light is both a wave an’ a particle–”

But the crowd had already been lost, the spell broken. The bar was no longer paying attention to him, and the old man grumbled unhappily.

“There’s a song, you know,” he muttered, even as the audience dispersed. When Agatha tried to slip off the stool and walk off, he grabbed her arm, his eyes wild. “Like the Song of the Spheres. The Heterodynes all hear the song of the Dyin’ Star. S'what helps them always find their way home.”

“You’ve had enough, Omar,” the bartender warned, and at his harsh look, the old man released her and turned to sulk into his glass.

Agatha walked away, grateful to be out of the bar and anonymously melting into station traffic.

There was no song of the spheres on Beetleburg Station. Most days, the only sound was the modulating buzz of the station’s protective field. The field meant safety, from any hostile forces that the Wulfenbach Armada didn’t already stop. Perhaps it was somewhat over-preparing for an eventuality that might never come, but Doctor Beetle’s policy was 'better safe than sorry’, and not few people agreed.

Agatha watched it sometimes through the porthole on the upper decks. It wavered between different wavelengths, like a strange aurora, as it filtered out all sorts of things; radiation, spacial anomalies, transmissions. The last one was a particular boon against the Other’s siren song–the transmissions that could brainwash people in an instant when they heard it. Deep in space, there were still the occasional buoys left over from the Other War, transmitting their songs.

Agatha tried not to think about that stuff. It couldn’t affect her here, on Beetleburg Station.

If she watched the field too long, sometimes it would make her nauseous, or light-headed. Nobody else experienced this same phenomenon, but her photosensitivity was yet another shortcoming she was growing bitterly accustomed to, like her inability to pass the certification test for Technician 2nd Tier. She would be on the off-shift, tightening screws and fixing leaks, for the rest of her life.

That was where Zeetha found her, moping as she stared off at the field.

“Hey, making yourself sick again?” Zeetha asked, as she hooked an arm around Agatha’s neck, and pulled her in to give a good-natured noogie.

Agatha yelped, surprised by the ambush, but equally surprised that she hadn’t anticipated it. Zeetha worked in Security, and this spot was right on her patrol route. This happened literally every day.

“I’m on my break!” Agatha said.

“So you use it for loitering?” Zeetha asked, barely retraining a smile. “Why, I should write you up!”

Agatha huffed a laugh, and swayed in place as Zeetha released her.

“Do you ever think about leaving Beetleburg Station?” Agatha asked.

“All the time,” Zeetha said without hesitation.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean– I’m sure you’ll be leaving for Skifander one day,” Agatha said quickly. “But if you had to wait anywhere else…”

Agatha didn’t get to finish the sentence, because she looked at Zeetha’s face and realized that Zeetha wasn’t listening. She was staring at the porthole, slack-jawed, and Agatha turned to look at the field just seconds before it burst into a final iridescent flash, and then flickered out and disappeared.

There was a single, numb moment in which the buzz of the field echoed in Agatha’s ears, before a discordant tune began ringing in her head, loud and beckoning.

 


	2. When the Bough Broke

“So that’s Mechanicsburg?”

The sight on the view screen did not give a good sense of scale, but at first glance, it looked closer to a hollowed-out planet than a space station.

Humanity’s dispersal to the stars had been chaotic for the first few generations. Entire civilizations had gone out and run their course in uncharted space, or returned changed to bring stories of strange and unimaginable things. The first Heterodyne, when he first came from uncharted space, crashed onto the scene aboard the largest, more ridiculously over-bloated dreadnought anyone had ever seen. It was alien tech, people whispered. The Heterodyne had bargained with monstrosities unimaginable for a weapon that would give him supremacy.

He’d built it himself, the more terrifying stories went. And each generation of Heterodyne after the first lived up to it by unleashing new horrors upon civilized space.

But the dreadnought hadn’t left the system in centuries. Whatever the lure of the Dyne Star was, it had made the Heterodynes keep the ship here, and build Mechanicsburg Station around it, in concentric decks and rings which turned to connect with each other in uncountable configurations.

Agatha remembered the old stock clips of Mechanicsburg in its proud, during the Heterodyne Boys’ time. The rings had turned in a complex non-Euclidian ballet, rings passing by and through each other inexplicably.

But ever since the Other’s attack, the rings had frozen into their configuration. A hole yawned through the broken rings and straight into the heart of Mechanicsburg, where the old dreadnought Castle was broken open, mad and dying, trapping the station in a decaying orbit which only the efforts of the Wulfenbach Armada managed to slow.

Mechanicsburg Station had fended off countless armies and attacks over the years. And yet, now, here it was, defenseless and quiet.

Or, well… not completely defenseless.

“Is this really safe?” Zeetha asked, giving a dubious look to the info-pad in her hand. She had one of the Mechanicsburg tourism pamphlets open. “It says here this area of space is a constant eight point five on the Bonkers scale.”

That didn’t sound safe, certainly. The Bonkers scale, named after Professor Thaddeus Bonkers, measured the density of anomalous spacial phenomena in an area. A place that was not space at all, and had no anomalous phenomena, was usually a one on the scale: places such as planets and the Core Worlds.

Most people didn’t even think of going anywhere that scored over a five. Most couldn’t be paid to get within spitting distance of a six.

Yet the Heterodynes had always been at ease navigating this strange system with its even stranger star.

Now that Agatha got a look at it, the Dyne Star seemed to pulse gently in time with the music in her head. She watched the Dyne for a long time, as she would the field around Beetleburg Station, but instead of making her feel nauseous, it made the music in her head feel like a warm heartbeat. She hadn’t even noticed it until the field went down on that day when Beetleburg Station was attacked, but it was as if her mind had been in a fog before, and now it was expanding to fill the entire universe.

Agatha was startled out of her reverie by Zeetha touching her shoulder. She flinched, and adjusted herself in the pilot seat.

“We should be fine,” Agatha said, “as long as we keep to the designated traffic lane.”

The ever-helpful Wulfenbach Armada had delineated a path through the system, and marked it with space buoys that transmitted a constant stream of navigational data. The anomalies tended to move around, but the keen minds working for Captain Wulfenbach had actually figured out a formula for how the anomaly field was going to shift. The buoys could even upload auto-pilot data straight to ships, and steer them into Mechanicsburg Station’s port. It was literally a fool-proof system, and there was no way to leave the lane unless it was deliberate, or you were a much more innovative fool than the Wulfenbach Engineer Corps had accounted for.

Agatha watched the navigational data scroll across the overhead display, and adjusted course accordingly. She was not much of a pilot–she was, in fact, not anything of a pilot outside a few failed simulations–but she was the closest thing because she’d read all the manuals. Zeetha didn’t know a lick of piloting, and Krosp was a cat. He wasn’t even tall enough to see over the console. He sat in the co-pilot seat instead, giving himself a tongue-bath.

The console gave a sharp trill as they were hailed.

“It’s Wulfenbach Security,” Agatha said, as she read out the information tag on the transmission.

“That’s probably not good,” Krosp said.

“Could just be routine,” Zeetha opined, and leaned over to pick up the transmitter from its fork and speak into it. She gestured for Agatha to kill the visual feed. “This is Interplanetary Small Freight Hauler Baba Yaga, please advise.”

“This is Wulfenbach Security. Baba Yaga, please activate your visual feed. We require visual identification before we allow docking.”

Agatha cast Zeetha a nervous look, but Zeetha grimaced and then put on her best freighter captain voice, feigning a spacer accent somewhat poorly.

“Negative, Wulfenbach Security. Visual feed on this old clanker is borked. Would be happy to do in-person identification after we dock, though! We’re just here on a juice run.”

There was a long moment of silence, tense as their request was apparently being considered. Agatha had no idea what they’d do once they actually docked, but she supposed that was a bridge they’d pass when they got to it.

Any hope of a reprieve was dashed when Agatha looked down to the navigational display and noticed a ship moving in to intercept. It was tagged as a Wulfenbach vessel.

Another voice came through the radio, this one gruffer and far less patient.

“Small Freight Hauler Baba Yaga, last chance for visual identification,” the voice spoke.

Zeetha raised the transmitter to her mouth, her expression pinched.

“…No?” she said tentatively.

“Prepare to be boarded,” came the reply.

Agatha twisted in her seat to look at Zeetha.

“What do we do?” she asked, as the navigational display showed the Wulfenbach ship closing in fast. The blinking dot seemed to be swooping down on them like a hawk.

“I’m thinking about it,” Zeetha said, but she did while loading a fresh cartridge into her ray gun, so Agatha could guess the arc of her thoughts.

Agatha blanched at the thought that they were about to get into a firefight with Wulfenbach forces, on board an old freighter that could barely hold together in even the best conditions.

“Leave the lane,” Krosp said abruptly.

“What?” Agatha squeaked.

“Eight point five on the Bonkers scale!” Zeetha shouted, gesturing wildly at the viewscreen.

“We know what happens if they catch us,” Krosp said, “We don’t know our odds in the anomaly fields, and those are bound to be better. And they might not even follow us in. Now, turn around and leave the lane before they get within range to blow our engines.”

It was the absolute worst idea Agatha had ever heard, but they were in the position to only afford bad ideas at the moment, so might as well take one from the cat. She veered off the lane as sharply as Baba Yaga could take a turn, and zipped past the buoys as fast as the sublight engines allowed.

It was still a fair bit slower than the Wulfenbach ship, which seemed like it was going to push for near-light speed catching up with them. It didn’t hesitate to leave the lane as well, making Agatha suspect that whoever was on board had already concluded they were fugitives. Not like running away didn’t prove it definitively.

Agatha pushed Baba Yaga as much as she dared, and she had only a moment’s warning, a glimpse of the navigational display from the corner of her eye, to see the projectile that the Wulfenbach ship launched. She pulled a sharp upwards turn, but what really saved them was an anomaly making the projectile burst backwards just off the Baba Yaga’s tail.

“What a terrible time to be on a ship without weapons!” Zeetha hissed. “Where are we going?”

“I don’t know!” Agatha replied, as she spun the ship end over end. She wasn’t sure why she did it until they felt the artificial gravity lag, sending them all floating for a second before falling back into position, and Agatha realized that she’d glanced against a spacial anomaly and somehow gained speed in the process. The Wulfenbach ship veered off the chase, trying to go around it and ending up mucked up in a gravitational pocket.

Her heart beating fast, Agatha could feel the music swelling in her head. With her expanding awareness, she could suddenly hear–and feel–a lot more than she had when this started. It was a sensation that had been growing in strength as she approached the Dyne Star, but now that she was right up against it, pulled and pushed by the embrace of its gravity, there seemed to be more nuance to the sensation. Like listening for the right notes, Agatha could feel where the anomalies were, and slip the ship between them easily. Sometimes, she’d feel what one or another anomaly would do, and pushed the little hauler a bit closer to them, and the pained rattle of the engines would ease, or old rust would flake away to reveal new metal, like healed skin beneath a scab.

This must have been how the Heterodynes did it. How they survived in this relentlessly hostile system, where so many others came to perish. The Dyne’s music would show them the way, and the anomalies were not all bad when you knew what to expect.

When Agatha said it out loud, it sounded a bit silly, and she thought maybe Zeetha and Krosp would laugh at her. But Zeetha just thumbed her chin thoughtfully as she considered.

“Huh,” Zeetha said, and looked at Krosp. “How’d you know she could do that?”

“Obviously, the Heterodynes had to have some way of navigating the anomaly field,” Krosp sniffed, “or else they’d never leave their station.”

“You guessed, didn’t you?” Zeetha poked at Krosp, grinning wildly. “You had her endanger our lives on some wild guess! That’s fantastic!”

Krosp raised his chin regally, and did not comment.

Agatha half-listened to the banter as another sensation distracted her. Overlaid with the music of the Dyne, and each note of the anomaly was another tune, complimentary yet distinct. This one felt more artificial, something composed rather than emerging organically, but there was something welcoming about it nonetheless, and Agatha followed the thread in a slow arc that brought them to the far side of Mechanicsburg Station.

“There’s more buoys,” Agatha said suddenly. “Not Wulfenbach ones.”

It took her a while to identify, and Baba Yaga’s scanners could just make out the buoys in the field of space debris that surrounded Mechanicsburg. To someone who was not actively looking for them and didn’t already know the frequency on which to scan, they would register only as junk, perhaps broken off spaceships during ancient battles and never cleaned up properly.

But there was something too purposeful about their positioning, and something about that tune ushering her along… drawing her close…

The end of the path was at a cavernous entrance into one of Mechanicsburg’s broken rings. The way the metal curled and warped at the edges, it looked like an open maw ready to devour, but Agatha knew, somehow, that inside would be safe. She trusted the music now.


	3. Cave Felem

Cats were not uncommon on space stations or ships. Any place that facilitated the traffic of people or freight tended to be plagued by vermin, and even technology specifically developed to deal with this problem had its limits. When the DNA scanners, energy nets, organic dischargers and cleaning automats with switchblades all failed, nothing could beat a good old fashioned cat for murder with great prejudice.

What stations tended not to have, however, were uplifted cats. It was not uncommon for frontier or backwater colonies to have uplifted animals, but this was seen as a practice typical to obscure outposts, where extra working hands were always needed, and if the extra working hands were also not recognized as people, that was all the better excuse not to pay a wage. Core Worlds abhorred even the creation of uplifted animals as inhumane, and the traders who kept the flow of commerce between the frontier and the Core Worlds tended to share in that attitude.

Krosp was… an interesting outlier, on a series of levels. Agatha still didn’t know what he’d been doing on the station, except his creator had apparently run foul of Captain Wulfenbach’s militia. But he was unusually sharp even for an uplifted animal, and self-interested in a way that tended to be eliminated on a gene level during the modification process.

Which was perhaps why Krosp was the first one to notice when the pack of mercenaries caught up with them.

“There’s three of them,” Krosp informed Agatha in an undertone, poking his whiskers out of her backpack just enough to be heard.

Agatha was in the middle of haggling for parts, so she didn’t pause to respond to Krosp, but her negotiations turned more aggressive after that.

They’d gotten as far as the Zumzum asteroid belt colony before Baba Yaga’s rickety old hyperstream engine finally gave out. They could have surfed the hyperstream for a while longer, letting it take them all the way into wild space, but there was no saying if they’d run into an outpost before they ran out of steam. Zumzum was the last civilized marker on their map.

Agatha didn’t get the part she needed, but she left the machine shop behind and walked into the flow of traffic. There wasn’t much of it; as a trading post, Zumzum was secondary at best, and made its living off asteroid mining. But in the crepuscular lighting of the colony, kept at 40% to preserve energy, Agatha was hoping she could at least lose the tail.

She dodged between two buildings, climbed up a ladder, scooted across a thick pipeline, and dropped into an alleyway on the other side of the marketplace. It looked like a refueling station just off the space dock, but it was empty of workers at this hour. The colony was small, but it was built into an asteroid, and it was twisty, especially since they were clever about the artificial gravity. You looked up, and what you saw wasn’t sky, but more buildings. Maybe that labyrinthine nature would be enough to help her escape pursuit.

She had to let Zeetha know about this pursuit. But calling her might be too risky, if the mercenaries were listening for any transmissions.

Agatha heard footsteps, and that sent her scurrying for a nearby grate, which she pried loose so she could hide into the crawlspace behind it. She had just enough time to pull the grate back into place before the footsteps turned a corner.

She help her breath, straining to listen and be quiet both at once, but the loudest thing was the thundering of her heart. Both she and Krosp stood absolutely frozen as they waited. The footsteps seemed to make a short circuit of the area just outside, and then fade into the distance.

The entire thing must have taken just five minutes, but Agatha was shaking with tension by the end. It might have just been paranoia, and whoever that was hadn’t even been looking for them, but after the narrow escape out of Mechanicsburg, Agatha didn’t want to take any risks.

Krosp’s ears flicked, swiveling back and forth as he strained to listen for any sign of approach.

“I think they may be gone,” he said.

“Oh, good.” Agatha pushed the grate off the entrance, careful not to rattle it too loudly. “We need to find Zeetha and–ack!”

Agatha was interrupted by a hand clamping down on her forearm as soon as she tried to leave the crawlspace, and dragging her out.

Krosp hissed as Agatha was dragged out, her feet kicking and stirring up dust.

“Hoy! Look vot ve got here!” a cheerful voice rang out, and that was when Krosp zipped out and jumped right onto the face of Agatha’s attacked.

The mercenary staggered back, dropping Agatha as he suddenly had a face full of claws to deal with.

“Agatha, run!” Krosp yelled, digging in viciously.

But when he glimpsed back at her, she was already in the clutches of a second mercenary, and–how had Krosp not heard two of them get so close?

Krosp froze with his claws still planted right in the face of the mercenary he’d attacked. He looked unusually green, now that Krosp thought about it. Baseline humans didn’t usually come in that kind of coloration. And if this wasn’t a human, then what–

The moment of hesitation was enough for the mercenary to grab Krosp by the scruff of his neck and peel him off, holding Krosp at arm’s length.

“Goot kitty,” the green one spoke, grinning even with the bleeding furrows on his face and neck, “but ve iz not goink to hurt hyu.”

The grip on his scruff was immobilizing, sending a numbness down from Krosp’s jaw to the rest of his body. But the mercenary dropped him, and Krosp landed gracefully on his feet. His fur stood on end as he hissed and prepared for another attack. There were three of them now, Krosp noticed. How were they this stealthy?

Agatha was not out of the fight yet. She snarled as she swung at her own opponent, managing a punch to the neck that would have made Zeetha proud. Most armor was vulnerable at the joints, and she’d been drilling Agatha on the weak points for every model.

“Hy giff up!” Agatha’s opponent said, throwing up his arms, and this actually had Agatha freeze in place, unsure about the sincerity of the statement, but unwilling to keep waling on someone who wasn’t fighting back.

“Ve iz ezpecially not goink to hurt you,” the green humanoid continued, and then fell to one knee, much to Krosp’s confusion. “Miztress,” he added, his grin still in place as his eyes were turned down.

Agatha looked flabbergasted for a moment. The second mercenary took off his helmet to reveal a purple complexion and a mane of enviably glossy hair. He knelt as well. And the third mercenary, who had a horn sticking out of his head and had foregone a helmet completely, joined them.

“Krosp, they’re Jägers,” Agatha whispered to him, awed and even a little scared. “Uh… please rise?”

The Jägers were on their feet with surprising speed, grinning at her.

“Hyu haff a goot cat,” the green one told her, voice rumbling with approval. “But how'z about ve do de fighting for hyu now?”


	4. Enemy's Enemy

“This is not a good idea,” Van Rijn hissed unhappily. His posture was stiff, his shoulders hunched so high that his chin was disappearing into the collar of his engineer’s uniform. He could afford to talk like this to his superior officer because it was only them in the tubelift at that moment.

Well, it was the two of them and the… other one. But Grand-Admiral Valois, perfectly composed, adjusted his sleeves with a calculated lack of interest, and tried not to think about the third presence in the lift.

“Since you’ve failed to find any mechanical solution to navigating the anomaly field,” Valois said, “we find ourselves in need of improvisation. And the Heterodynes are, so far, the only ones with a proven and successful ability to navigate any place above a seven on the Bonkers scale. We’ve lost too many ships on your experiments, Van Rijn!” His voice boomed on that last sentence, and Van Rijn’s already tense body wound even tighter. “The only way we can stop this horror in its tracks is if we bypass the anomaly field and blow up their system directly, and the Heterodynes are as much in danger as all of us. They will cooperate if it means securing their own future.”

“And afterwards?” Van Rijn spat.

“After,” Valois said, composed again, “we will see how the relationship has evolved.”

The Grand-Admiral tilted his head to give the looming presence behind them an askance look.

“And you, Otilia? I suppose you have your own opinions?” Valois said.

Otilia stirred out of her restive state only to look down at Valois with that sad and knowing look that he’d learned to hate.

“This will not end the way you wish it to,” she warned.

Valois hummed dismissively, and turned to look straight ahead. Her straightened his jacket, fretting at his own appearance.

He’d never liked the Muses. Van Rijn had made much of them at first. Who wouldn’t, when they were such a powerful symbol? The Heterodynes might have had their alien troops, but Grand-Admiral Valois of the Shining Alliance had his own alien advisors. Nine being of pure energy, descended into elegant robotic forms at Van Rijn’s behest. Their abilities seemed to border on magical at times, and they’d been indispensable during the long conflict to tame uncharted space.

But Valois began a long time ago to understand what a poisoned gift they truly were. He’d asked once if they would leave their physical bodies and return to their own plane of existence once the wars were over, and he’d learned that they could never do that. The process of incarnating had changed them irreparably, and they would never be able to go home. They’d known this, and Van Rijn had known this, and they’d all still thought it worth the price.

It was a depth of unthinking cruelty that Valois had never imagine of his old friend, and that was perhaps the first crack in their now-deteriorating relationship. How could Van Rijn think he’d ever want to keep these strange, benevolent monsters around forever? How could the Muses mutilate themselves only to stand by his side?

The door to the tubelift opened, revealing the docking bay of the Tempest. There was a rush of activity around a shuttlecraft that did not match any of the Tempest’s own; too many jagged angles, and painted a brassy bronze where all of the Tempest’s shuttlecrafts were white and gray.

Valois walked smoothly to meet his guest, and when Euphrosynia Heterodyne spotted him, she smiled. Her hands were clasped behind her back, her chin tilted up, but her hip was cocked a bit too much for a parade rest. The Heterodyne irreverence only looked charming on her, somehow.

He rushed forward to meet her, Otilia trailing after him.

Neither saw the look that crossed Van Rijn’s face.


	5. Drink Deep and Think Good Thoughts

The room seem to shake as Vole flung himself against the glass. The isolation chamber was soundproof, but something about the brutality of the impact and the complete lack of regard for his own well-being gave the entire thing a visceral quality that made Agatha’s mind fill in the details.

“What’s wrong with him?” Agatha asked.

“De blood haz run out,” Maxim said, eyes sad and empty as he watched Vole. “Iz vot heppenz ven a Jäger haz not had a Heterodyne in a vhile.”

“Would… would that happen to all of you eventually?” Agatha asked, sudden horror rising like bile to her throat.

“Iz de nature ov de Troth,” Dimo said. “De Jägerdraght make uz better, but it iz de Heterodyne who keeps uz dot vay.”

“It hardly seems like an even trade,” Agatha said.

“Iz not even!” Maxim said. “Ve got de better deal ov it! Ve voz vild und purpozeless, und de Heterodynez took uz to de stars vhere ve fight tings ve neffer imagined on de old vorld!”

“Yah, hyu iz a goot girl,” Oggie added, “like hyu poppa un hyu uncle, hyu vant efferyvun to be fair to each odder. But dey neffer voz comfortable vit people haffink odder meaningz ov de vord ‘fair’.”

Still, Agatha winced, as Vole made another run at the glass wall, trying to claw his way through reinforced unshatterable plastic. He was beginning to make a dent in it.

“There’s got to be a way to help him,” she said. “We can’t just leave him. I won’t.”

Dimo, Oggie and Maxim shared a look between them, as Agatha turned around and began rifling through the old abandoned lab for any leftover supplies. They’d been in the middle of scavenging when they ran into Vole, and then they had to trick him into the isolation chamber to trap him, but Agatha had already been checking this lab, and she remembered there was an intact supply cabinet in the corner.

She found needles, still in their sterile packaging, and a syringe.

“It’s in the blood, isn’t it?” she asked, setting everything on the table.

“It iz,” Dimo admitted reluctantly. “But Hy dunno if it vill vork. Hy haff neffer seen anyvun try on a Jäger dis far gone before.”

“I’m still going to try,” she said firmly. “Are you in?”

The Jägers stared at her for a moment, something quiet and solemn in their expression–before Oggie ruined the moment by sniffling loudly.

“Ve iz vit hyu, Miztress,” Oggie declared, his voice shaky.


	6. The Descendant, Exceptional

“So the guy with the uplifted attack dogs was–?”

“My cousin Tweedle,” Tarvek admitted reluctantly. He hunched around his mug of coffee, trying to look like he was nursing it, and not just sulking. He was moderately successful.

Agatha blinked at this.

“Not a lot of family feeling there, I’m guessing?” she prompted.

Tarvek rubbed his forehead, but then reached into his coat.

“Hey! Hey!” Krosp said warningly, waving the ray gun that he already had trained on Tarvek. He was holding it under the table, as to not alert the other patrons in the diner, but he made his point.

“It’s just a data chit,” Tarvek promised, as he opened his coat and reached into the pocket. He indeed extracted a data  chit, which he slid across the table to Agatha.

It was bright garish orange, like official governmental data chits tended to be, and Agatha slid it into her wrist computer to read it.

“This says you have salvage rights to the Tempest,” she said flatly.

“Yes, it does,” Tarvek confirmed, taking a sip of his coffee and giving her a smug look over the rim of the mug.

“…Look, I don’t mean to say you got scammed,” Agatha started slowly, “but we had this bar on Beetleburg Station where every week, some tourist was getting sold salvage rights to the Tempest. I think you’re splitting the take with about five thousand people at this point.”

“Oh? And were those salvage rights certified by the Core Worlds Ministry?” Tarvek asked, raising an eyebrow.

Agatha scrolled down a bit, and discovered that whatever this document was, it had indeed been certified by the closest thing to a legitimate government outside of Wulfenbach’s Pax Lactea. A stagnant obsolete government, but still one with some legitimacy.

“Alright, probably not,” Agatha said. “But isn’t the Tempest an historical artifact? The Core Worlds have laws against salvaging relics.”

“True,” Tarvek agreed, “but you see, there’s something called the Descendant Exception. Salvage rights apply to significant historical artifacts if enacted by a descendant of the former proprietor or recognized historical figure associated with said artifact.”

“So you’re saying…” Agatha tried not to smile. “Um. Sure. You’re descended from Grand-Admiral Valois.”

“Through my mother,” Tarvek said. 

“Of course. You and every redhead this side of Andromeda,” Agatha said agreeably.

“Oh, stop it. The Core Worlds have Valois’ DNA on record, you know. They don’t just hand out these things willy-nilly. At any rate,” Tarvek extended his hand for the data chit, and Agatha ejected it from her wrist computer and handed it back, “the fact that there’s only one set of salvage rights is precisely why Tweedle is out to kill me. I have the best claim, and he has the second best after mine.”

“But what did _I_ do?” Agatha demanded.

“You’re a Heterodyne,” Tarvek pointed out flatly.

Agatha looked around wildly, but the sleepy diner was empty at this time of the station’s work cycle. A waitress was dozing in the corner, far out of earshot.  
Tarvek leaned in closer, lacing his fingers together on the tabletop.

“You are,” he said firmly. “And Tweedle probably thinks you’re out to destroy the Tempest, or keep it for yourself.”

“I’m not,” Agatha blurted. “I just… need some parts. To repair the Castle.”

“Ah. So a bit of both, then,” Tarvek said dryly. “Luckily for you, I’m inclined to help.”

Agatha narrowed her eyes at him.

“Why?” she asked.

“Because I don’t seek the Tempest. I want what’s on it.” He paused for dramatic effect. “I’m going to find the Muses.” 


End file.
